The analog city: maintaining everyday life through repair and Jugaad

Julia Corwin

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Urban scholarship consistently discusses improvisation and heterogeneity as central to urban life in the global South. In this article, I bring together scholarship on urban improvisation and the digital world of smart cities to understand the city as analog. In response to conceptions of the smart city as an uncontested space of technical expertise and efficiency, the analog city recognizes the city as being made and remade through analog labor: hands‐on, relational work responsive to the city around it. I use the example of maintenance and repair work to explore the analog nature of cities, building on years of ethnographic research on electronics repair in Delhi. I follow this labor along two seemingly different scales: local electronics repair in informal shops, and the maintenance of data centers for India's smart cities. Drawing on the north Indian term ‘jugaad’, used to describe circumstances in which nonelite strategies intervene to fix things, I argue that the analog city recognizes a world of things with which we can negotiate and work, but never control. I conclude by reflecting on the importance of embodied relationality to the analog city and speculate on an urban futurity focused on the openness of possibilities for urban life.

Keywords: repair; smart cities; labor; improvisation; urban life; jugaad; India (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: J01 R14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 16 pages
Date: 2026-04-01
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Published in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 1, April, 2026. ISSN: 0309-1317

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